The following description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together with disclosures not known to the relevant art prior to the present invention but provided by the invention. Some of such contributions of the invention may be specifically pointed out below, whereas other such contributions of the invention will be apparent from their context.
Because frequency spectrum is a limited resource, several communication systems may share the same spectrum. In a given frequency spectrum a given number of frequency bands may be given to different system utilizing different access methods. For example, GSM signals may share the spectrum with CDMA, EVDO, WCDMA, LTE and/or WiMAX signals. GSM stands for Global System for Mobile communication, CDMA for Code Division Multiple Access, EVDO for Evolution-Data Optimized, WCDMA for Wideband Code Division Multiple Access, LTE for Long Term Evolution and WiMAX for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. These are different communication systems or access methods.
A receiver or a scanner given the task of finding available channels of a given communication system should be able to scan the desired frequency spectrum as fast as possible. As the frequency spectrum may comprise channels of different system the task is challenging. This applies not only to receivers but scanners.
The current state-of-the-art in GSM Base Station Identity Code BSIC scanner technology provides a performance level which is normally adequate when a follow-phone mode of operation is used. In follow-phone mode only one to three GSM channels may be scanned periodically, typically a few times a second. However, when a full-band 850 MHz or 1900 MHz GSM BSIC scan is desired or a multi-technology scan is desired the scan rates are too slow. For example, a full-band scan in the PCS1900 band of 300 channels taking more than 5 seconds is considered too long. There is a need for faster GSM BSIC scanning using simple tasking of the scanner technology. Simple tasking of scanning all channels in the bands would provide the user with a quick way to configure the scanner without regard to the different cellular signal types and would basically automate the process for the user.
In addition, a multi-technology scanner needs to be able to scan all technologies at fast speeds and very efficiently in the dense cellular environment of mixed technologies.